"cowardly lion" meaning in All languages combined

See cowardly lion on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Forms: cowardly lions [plural]
Etymology: After a character in L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Head templates: {{en-noun}} cowardly lion (plural cowardly lions)
  1. (figuratively) A person who acts tough but misses a golden opportunity out of fear or cowardice. Wikipedia link: Cowardly Lion, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Tags: figuratively Categories (topical): Fictional characters, People, The Wizard of Oz

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for cowardly lion meaning in All languages combined (3.0kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "After a character in L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "cowardly lions",
      "tags": [
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      "expansion": "cowardly lion (plural cowardly lions)",
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  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
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        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Fictional characters",
          "orig": "en:Fictional characters",
          "parents": [
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            "Artistic works",
            "Art",
            "Culture",
            "Society",
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        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "People",
          "orig": "en:People",
          "parents": [
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            "Fundamental"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "The Wizard of Oz",
          "orig": "en:The Wizard of Oz",
          "parents": [
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            "Literature",
            "Fiction",
            "United States",
            "Culture",
            "Entertainment",
            "Writing",
            "Artistic works",
            "North America",
            "Society",
            "Human behaviour",
            "Language",
            "Art",
            "America",
            "All topics",
            "Human",
            "Communication",
            "Earth",
            "Fundamental",
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        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "\"This $13 billion mutual fund, which calls itself \"classic growth investing, the Janus way,\" is in reality a cowardly lion.\" -Forbes"
        },
        {
          "text": "\"California is right; we trust Washington state will follow in court. Earlier court decisions against the EPA's Cowardly Lion position on global warming suggest legal action may have good prospects.\" -Seattle Post Intelligencer"
        },
        {
          "text": "\"On the cowardly “lion” derisive nickname: The 49ers PR people are saying that Georgatos/Brown merely overheard a few players joking about that in the locker room, and that Smith was in on it–it was just jocularity among QBs, meaning nothing, and used out of context in the story. That’s what they’re saying.\" -http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/kawakami/2007/12/12/whos-with-me-on-alex-smiths-side-plus-more-notes-on-the-smith-nolan-feud-and-clumsy-attempted-cover-up/"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A person who acts tough but misses a golden opportunity out of fear or cowardice."
      ],
      "id": "en-cowardly_lion-en-noun-THw97NTR",
      "links": [
        [
          "golden opportunity",
          "golden opportunity"
        ],
        [
          "fear",
          "fear"
        ],
        [
          "cowardice",
          "cowardice"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(figuratively) A person who acts tough but misses a golden opportunity out of fear or cowardice."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "figuratively"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "Cowardly Lion",
        "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "cowardly lion"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "After a character in L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).",
  "forms": [
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  ],
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  "lang_code": "en",
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  "senses": [
    {
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        "English entries with incorrect language header",
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        "English eponyms",
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      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "\"This $13 billion mutual fund, which calls itself \"classic growth investing, the Janus way,\" is in reality a cowardly lion.\" -Forbes"
        },
        {
          "text": "\"California is right; we trust Washington state will follow in court. Earlier court decisions against the EPA's Cowardly Lion position on global warming suggest legal action may have good prospects.\" -Seattle Post Intelligencer"
        },
        {
          "text": "\"On the cowardly “lion” derisive nickname: The 49ers PR people are saying that Georgatos/Brown merely overheard a few players joking about that in the locker room, and that Smith was in on it–it was just jocularity among QBs, meaning nothing, and used out of context in the story. That’s what they’re saying.\" -http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/kawakami/2007/12/12/whos-with-me-on-alex-smiths-side-plus-more-notes-on-the-smith-nolan-feud-and-clumsy-attempted-cover-up/"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A person who acts tough but misses a golden opportunity out of fear or cowardice."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "golden opportunity",
          "golden opportunity"
        ],
        [
          "fear",
          "fear"
        ],
        [
          "cowardice",
          "cowardice"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(figuratively) A person who acts tough but misses a golden opportunity out of fear or cowardice."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "figuratively"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "Cowardly Lion",
        "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "cowardly lion"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-24 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (46b31b8 and c7ea76d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.